A Little More On The Voting Rights Atrocity

There are those optimistic souls out there already pointing to the huge bipartisan margins by which Congress regularly reauthorized the Voting Rights Act as a reason for hope that the Congress will take up the challenge issued to it by the Supreme Court today and rejigger Section IV to make it compliant with the ruling in Shelby County. Alas for those folks, the only reason those margins were so huge and bipartisan was the Republican and conservative congresscritters were afraid that minority voters would take it out on them if they didn't reauthorize the VRA. Today, of course, the Court made the likelihood of effective retaliation at the polls, ah, less than it was yesterday.

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And, continuing the proud National Review tradition of opposition to Negro suffrage, the kidz at The Corner refer us to an Abigail Thernstrom The-VRA-Was-Good-For-Its-Time yadda-yadda which conflates voting rights solely with the election of black politicians, and which concludes that the primary legacy of the VRA was that it gave racist Southern pols a new tool with which to keep black people in their place. If you want to see where John Roberts got his notion about the day of jubilee, you can do worse than give this thing a read.